Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The issue I see here is that if you expert plain-text responses, someone
  > might just submit something that breaks the format, or even submit an
  > email written in HTML.

This is not a major problem.  The only thing that breaks the format of
an inbox file is "From " in column 0, and the worst thing that does is
generate a junk message.

The program that generates the message can easily prevent this from
happening.

  > You
  > wouldn't want someone who could submit 1000 fake or troll responses,
  > just because they know what what's going on behind the scenes.

It's not likely that people will do this, and if they do,
it would not be hard to delete those fake messages from the file.

  > All in all, I don't this that this should be an issue, SQLite is well
  > documented,

Even if it is very good documentation, reading it and learning will
take work.  I don't want to have to read it, or learn how to do
something with SQLite.  It would be an extra unnecessary layer to
cause confusion or problems, and there is no need for that complexity.

                and can easily be extracted into whatever format someone
  > might need or want, just easier than with a mailbox or other classical
  > unix-like approaches.

It is not as easy for people who don't know or use database systems as
it is for you.

If some people find it helpful to analyze the data through a database
system, I have nothing against their doing so.  It won't be hard to
have a program parse the inbox file and enter the data.  The script
can detect when a message was split, and disregard it.

Or people can fix the broken messages with Emacs, either by hand
with a Lisp program.

It is also possible to handle each user's input in two ways
when it is entered: put it into a database _and_ email it.
That way, everyone's preferences are satisfied.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)